The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - Backyard Beekeeping Episode 373 LIVE CHAT edition, September 26th of 2026

Episode Date: September 26, 2026

This is the audio from today's YouTube video:  https://www.youtube.com/live/34hho9P-414?si=tKCwoX01wiGZu8g2

And it's time. So we're live. Finally, sitting here for a few minutes waiting for the clock to run out so it would be time to start. So I'm glad for those of you that are here in the chat already. But we're going to start normally the way I do every Friday Q&A. So hello and welcome. Happy Friday. Today is Friday, September the 25th of 2006. And this is Backer Bekeeping Questions and Answers episode number 373. I'm Frederick Dunn. And this is the way to be live chat version. Why is it live? When's it live? When is it live? It's live the last Friday of every month. And this is the last Friday of September. So I know if that snuck up on you, you're not alone. And speaking of sneaking up, there's a lot of storms and stuff hitting the Eastern Sea Board of the United States right now. And it's not a good time to be in Hawaii either while we're talking. So I hope most of you are in the clear. And that would be great. So I know what you want to know, though, what's going on outside right here. And if you want to know what we're going to talk about today. day. Later on, this information catches up and you can look down in the video description and you'll see all the topics listed in order with timestamps. So you can check it out. Also in the future, if you have a question that she'd like to submit for my consideration or a topic you just want to hear discussed, please go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, fill out the form and you never know. You might be talking about you and the things that are important to you. So the other thing is, we also have a Facebook group. So if you want to talk live with someone,

show a picture, share a video that you'd like to upload and get an opinion about some bees or your hives or whatever might be happening. It's called the Way to Be Fellowship, and it's on Facebook. Small group. People from all over the world, though, super friendly, super nice. So I know what you want to know. What's the temperature outside? Well, let me tell you, a 64.6 degrees Fahrenheit, a near perfect day, and I'm giving it up to be here with you inside. That's how important you are, which is 18 Celsius, so I care about those.

They want to know everything in Celsius as well. And the low last night, this is important because night temps are dropping. Now, as long as it doesn't freeze, things are pretty decent. But when it cools off at night and then warms up during the day, you know what happens? So the nectar producing plants, their tiny nectaries have a higher concentration of sucrose. And then the bees are going to fly out there and get it and bring it home at a very critical time right now. And so it dropped a 33.6 degrees Fahrenheit last night. So that's above freezing and in Celsius.88 Celsius.

So not terrible, but things are good. And the bees are super busy. What's the wind like right now? Because the wind can mess them up. It's zero miles per hour. What's that in kilometers per hour? Also, zero. So 68% relative humidity, not too damp.

We don't have any rain in the immediate forecast. That's great news. And there's going to be a full moon tonight. So for those you like to walk around at night and just have the moon as your flashlight. This is it unless you have overcast skies and things like that. And so if you've got questions for me and I see questions that are popping up already, you type them in all caps.

And some people will join us later and you can remind them of that. It's not shouting. It's just a way to get my attention. So I know you're not just talking to one another. So we are going to cover those questions. And my bouncers in the house, that's Keith Spillman, Half Tracks and Honey. So I think, you know, you don't want to cross. Keith, things could go bad for you. Or at the very least, you could lose your voice in the chat.

So anyway, golden rod is fading. It's a sad time because it's turning brown instead of that beautiful golden color. New England aster's, the blue ones, purple asters or whatever they're called, are the top choice of the bees because we hear them before we see them. They're all over the asters. A lot of people don't like astor honey because it's super smelly and also has a propensity to crystallize early. What else is going great? Maximumine, sunflowers. So if you plant those, and we do, they have taken over. You can see them from, and I'm not joking, a mile away. They stand out as this big, bright golden patch, some three or four feet high, and others are nine and ten feet high, multiple blooms. The honeybees are all over

those two. So Cosmos, that's something we plant, it's an annual. The maximions, if you plant them, they're good forever. They just continue to go. It's perennial. Cosmos, we plant every year. The bees are on them and some native bees also go to those. So that's super handy. And that's pretty much it. So before I get to the topics that were submitted by people before today, I'm going to look at what's going on. Oh, look. Aaron Shelton says, Fred, Appame and Top Vents. Would you buy 3D print top vent caps or just permanently? Permanently hot? Anyway, there are caps for their vents, which I don't buy. So anyway, the Appamahe hives, they have a very good hive top feeder system with, again, their outside cover.

The outside cover also has vents in it front and back. And I didn't like them. Didn't like when they first came out because I liked to have zero venting for the bees. And the bees can't get to those to seal them up or they would. So what I do all the time now is I put a single layer. it's single bubble, not double bubble, so it's reflectics. It's sold as, if you don't know what that is, and you're wondering what I'm talking about. It's like bubble wrapped.

It's got aluminum foil facing on it, top and bottom, which creates a reflective surface for insulation. And if it seals up an airspace, it adds really good R value. I put a single layer of that on top of the Apamea feeder. And then I put the Apamee cover over that, and then that creates a seal. So I don't have any air movement through there. It's what I do all the time. So I know some people put RTV and they put silicone and everything else to close up those vents, but it's unnecessary because all we're trying to do is keep air from passing through. You could even just put a thin sheet of other material like plastic in there.

You can even put a trash bag up in there if you just wanted to stop air. Whether reflectics or double bubble will give you insulation value as well for the food that they're going to get. Jessica Care Reviews. Jessica reviews. Okay. I knew I could read that. Do all asters species crystallize fast are just the purple astor? Have a lot of other plants in the Astor family.

There are over 20 species of asters right here. And I can't answer that. I don't know. The bottom line is that the more particulates that end up in the honey, the more there is to attach themselves to, like we know the snowflakes. When snowflakes fall off in the sky, they're attaching themselves to particulates in the air, and they can't form without being able to attach to a particulate.

So asters are just providing a lot of material that comes along with the nectar because your bees can't get away from the pollen that they have, and it's super sticky. And so I don't know that one variety is cleaner in that regard than others, because some asters are really tiny. And those New England asters are nice and big, the purple asters. I don't know. But I know one thing, they don't seem to be able to separate it. So I think you're going to get crystallized.

It's not like we could have one variety of asters because they're just everywhere on their own. We don't plan them. They just come up. But that's a great question. I don't have an answer other than that some people don't like Astros at the point where they don't even use the honey. You know what they do with the honey? When they get it from Astros and some people are even down on Goldenrod too, they just feed it back to the beef. because they don't want it.

We want it. We like it. My supervisor likes it. He sells it. He goes door to door. And so that's how that works. Trojo says, What are you painting to auction at the Hives for Heroes dinner during the North American Honeybee Expo?

I haven't decided yet. So that's interesting. I don't know if any of you were there last year. Last year I painted a scene called A Place to Be. And it, of course, was a little sunny meadow in the woods. with an Adirondack chair, and I painted that on an old hive panel, and then it went up for auction.

So all I know is that I'm doing another painting this year. It'll be an oil painting. It's likely going to be on Belgian linen. And this year, it's going to be an actual painting on canvas so that somebody can take it and, you know, hang on their wall if they want to. But remember, you're sponsoring hives for heroes. You're not necessarily.

None of it comes to me, so it's just, you're not. It's just going to be whatever I feel like and I haven't decided. So I just kind of fire in, as Bill Alexander used to say, which if you don't know who that is, he's the guy that taught Bob Ross how to paint. So he was before Bob Ross. And you just go with what you feel and paint something and hope that people care enough about it, that they'll spend their hard in money and support veterans.

And so, but it will be an oil painting on canvas. Haven't decided. I think it might not be framed. I might just have gallery wrapped. canvas so then people can frame it or not ready to go next thing here is uh richard walcott says hi fred had 26 minutes and my last alco 26 mites here said minutes and my last alcohol wash temp's not below 85 here in south florida for formic pro can they do oav seven treatments four grams every four days you could because the OAB, and for those of you're wondering what that is, axelic acid vaporization,

there's a dose per delivery. In other words, you could do it every five days until you get the mite drop and ultimately no mites in the mite drop that you're targeting, and it doesn't overdose the bees. So that seems pretty safe to do. It's been thoroughly tested, and you could continue to do that. So yeah, we have to watch out if you're still in hot temps. We aren't here, but if you are there, You have to be careful about the formic pro because you will cook your bees. They can't handle it, especially that first 72 hours there. So hives have to be strong because you can lose some bees. And you have to have full width, full open everything.

So all the entrances and stuff on your hive would be wide open for that. The other OAB is clear. So Ross Wagner says, just checked a hive and there was decent brood, but not swimming in jelly. didn't look the best. I didn't see much pollen. I'm thinking of putting a patty on the feeder. Your thoughts. Okay. Now that way to go, Ross, that's a hot button ticket among the experts. And I'm not including myself in that group. I'm talking entomologists. People that understand being nutrition, even they argue about this, whether or not you should put pollen patties on or something like that at this time of year and what the benefits are. So Dr. Jamie Ellis would tell you no. Randy, all of you. Randy, all. Oliver would tell you absolutely. So it really depends on where you are and what pollen resources there are. But I'll tell you what I would just do as a backyard beekeeper. If I thought pollen was low, nutrition was low at a time when they're still brooding up, you can put out dry pollen substitute in your yard. Don't put it on a hive. Don't put it in the hive because then we don't know

if they're just getting it out because they have to get it out of the way. And then let the bees forage for it. And there are three top performing pollen substitutes. So there's AP 23. Datant sells that, I believe. There's Megabee that BetterB sells. And then there's UltraB, which Man Lake sells. So if you could get any of those three, I think they're pretty equal across the board. If you're just trying to boost a pollen dearth that you might be having this time of year. And then they'll go out, discover that and bring it back. I would do that over putting a patty in. patties are expensive. Nothing wrong with winter patties, for example. Pollan patties, though, if you really don't need to push them, because remember, they're just responding to the environment

anyway. So if the environment's back and down and the brood gets reduced as a result of that, that's part of local adaptation, in my opinion, but I wouldn't spend the money for pollen patties right now. 15% protein, I think, is pretty standard for pollen patties if you want to get them. because remember they have a limited shelf life too. So I put out dry pollen sub. I'd be interested in that what others think about that recommendation. So next is Jessica again, painting plans sound lovely and supporting a great cause. Yeah, absolutely.

And Marianna here says, I saw my queen today, but no eggs or larvae. There's a lot of brood hatching. Do I have a problem with having no eggs or larvae? That ties in with what we were just talking about, which is nutritional supply. Often, if you have a queen and you know for sure that she's a fertile queen, she's not producing right now, we know that their cue is what the nurse bees are feeding them and the nurse bees are keying off of what's coming in through the front door of the hive

through the entrance. So if they don't have enough resources to provide them, what they need to raise brood, they lean out the queen and the queen slows production. So another thing that can happen, so this is interesting to watch, the queens because I've observed this, a direct observation. So the queen was scooting around in an observation hive, go figure, laying eggs, and the eggs were coming. In fact, the egg was started to stick out just a little bit before she would put her abdomen down in to park the egg. And you know what the workers were doing, the nurse bees. Some of them were actually removing

the egg before she even had a chance to put it in the cell. So it may not be that the queen isn't producing or laying eggs, but that the nurse bees know they can. afford this brood based on the resources they have and they're actually consuming them i'm not saying that is what's happening but there are a lot of possibilities but it all kind of falls back on nutrition so sunny says sunny maiman sunny anyway i was at the auction your piece brought a lot thank you so much i was surprised i was very surprised i do know that my ping pong ball didn't get as much as Jeff Horschoff's being bombed, well, and he won't let me hear at the end of it. So it's all for fun.

It's all fundraising. So that's good to know. So again, those of you are just joining us. If you have a comment for me, please type it in all caps. And if I forget, somebody let me know. Say, hey, Fred, you skipped one. There are time codes on them so I can go back to 411 or whatever. So the first question here comes in.

We have a couple of this. Now, this person was referred to me from Flow Hive in Australia about how to pack down the flow high. So one of the reasons I make videos, in fact, the series you're watching right now, the reason I started doing it is so that I wouldn't have to say the same things over and over. I could just, you know, send people to a video that I've made and then more people could see it, and then we wouldn't have to retread it all the time. So I have a page marked the flow hive experience, and it's on my website, which is the way to be.org. And there it shows all the information particularly on that topic.

And so it shows winter packdowns and everything else, which aren't necessarily specific just to that hive design and just that company. So it kind of defines my my configurations for winter. And then that I got two questions right in. In fact, she's here tonight. Jessica Review 613 also gave me a question about what's your preferred preferred winter configuration. Woody's B said it.

Jessica said, same question on my mind. I'm going to talk about it. I say it so many times. It's the same thing over and over. Although you should keep asking because you never know I could change my mind because I'm one of those beekeepers who can adapt and change and reconfigure my hives after several seasons. If things aren't working out, I do make changes. So I'm not like the AI Amish beekeeper that comes on and talks to you about secret traditions that the government will let you know about. Watch out for AI. They're very sneaky. Amish people do not go on video.

I'm just letting you know. So anyway, this is just the basics. Remove your queen excluders if you have them on this time of year. Getting colder. Align all the parts and fix damage to your hives. You don't want to go out and find out you have extra holes in your hive bodies are misaligned. And why do we want to make sure alignment's critical right now?

Because it's still warm enough that, they can repropylize the damage that you, the beekeeper, are about to do. So we also need to pack down our hives. We don't expand hives this time of year. But oftentimes you open up a hive and it's wall-to-wall bees. How are you going to condense or pack down a hive like that? We need to look at the bottom box, too. And so my standard configuration, and it has to remain adaptable to the colony

and what we find when we look in it. But it is a deep box, eight or ten frame makes no doubt. difference. Medium box on top of that. Also, eight or 10 frame makes no difference. I used to put that medium box on early in the year, let them cap it and fill it with honey. And then anything above that was the surplus, the super. So then what I did last year, because I was talking to other beekeepers, as beekeepers do, and then people get insistent about their ways and they want you to try what's going on. So Steve or Paskey, who also happens to be the author of Swarm Essentials, does single-brewood box management. So he pulls everything off down to the main brood box and then winters over

with feed on top of that. So I tried it to prove him wrong and it worked. And so I may not have needed the medium box. But the key to that is you have to have that on now. You can't like make that shift too late in the year to where they can't fill it up. And let me, you know, and this is, you'll hear people say that all beekeeping is local. So just as was discussed earlier, Ross Wagner, he's got problems with resources coming into his hives. We have great resources right now, right here. The air is still heavy with honey where we are. So they're still bringing stuff in. And a friend of mine, friends, Bill and Wendy, left the country for two weeks and came back and a cluster of bees formed on the bottom of his

swarm trap. And they built out full. combs in two weeks and are putting pollen in there and brood in there. They didn't move into something's wrong with his swarm trap. But they didn't move into it. They built all these frames. They're doomed. They're absolutely exposed. There's nothing else we're going to do.

You would think somebody would video that and share it with you later, which I'm going to. And I already did video it yesterday. But my point is they brought in enough resources as a swarm to build out six or seven full combs. And that's remarkable stuff. So you, if you're configured now, they can backfill and take care of things. So the configurations we're talking about. Also, level up your hives. Think about water dripping down the inside of the hive, which is likely to happen in wintertime, and level it side to side and tilt it slightly towards the entrance slant landing board.

Very important to let that water out. Okay, so insulated. intercovers insulated intercover insulated outer cover you can't overdo insulation the only question is what you really need so with the wooden boxes and we have a variety of configurations right here i'm in a terrible situation with my bees because we went from 42 colonies in spring to 62 we are going backwards the target remember is 10 so insulation uh on top we condensation is going to form on the side If you've got a screen bottom board with a removable tray, you're going to be on top of that. If you can tilt it towards the entrance, you're going to be on top of that too. They need a lot of moisture in the wintertime.

A lot of people don't understand that, but they also produce a lot of moisture. We just don't want that to form over the top of them. So insulated intercover. Clean around your hives. That's part of winter prep. So if you've got overgrown bee yards, not all of you have an 11-year-old that you can send out there to weed whack everything with electric weed wax. like the supervisor does for me. But trim everything down around your hives.

If your hives are on grass and mine are, we trim it all down really tight because remember, vermin are headed for your beehives this winter. So the more hiding places we give them, the more they're going to move in. So that cuts down on mice and rodents and things like that. Also, reduce your entrances if you don't already follow the three-eighths of an inch by three inches wide.

Large colonies can go to four, but that's my standard entrance year round. And it allows you clear out dead bees. You can use your hive cleaning tool. That's what this thing is. It reaches into the back. You can scoop out the dead bees and get them out of there in the wintertime if they don't make the flights.

And that 3 eighths of an inch even blocks the shrew, the short-tailed shrew. So I have video evidence. The shrews, the mice, the deer mice, the house mice, the meadow mice, which are voles. They don't climb anything. but the deer mice can run straight up the front of a hive that has no landing board, but it can't get in that 3 eighth inch entrance.

So also, when you're pulling off your frames and you're packing down, don't forget to freeze those frames. Don't put them, don't extract and put them in a hive butler tote and then store them in your shed because they may already have eggs from, what do you think, wax moths. So then they'll eat yourself in storage unless you get a really cold night, some of you're in warmer areas.

and then feeder shims on all the time. I leave my feeder shims on. There's no reason to have to store them in a shed when I can store them on top of the beehive. And then if I need to feed, they're there. They're ready to go. If I don't need to feed, they're also there unnecessary. Better to have it, not need it, as they say.

Now let me look. We've got some caps up here. Let's see. Oh, this is from Kathy Skirls. It says, thank you so much for your honey drawing setup video. set mine up like yours minus the weather station. It works like a charm. Yes, that's good. I love feedback like that. And then Kathy's girls also says, Hi, Fred, cannot find the episode that you talk about how to clean a dead out hive of pollen and dead brood. Can you go over that for me? I won't go

over that just for you. I'm going to go over it for everyone. I wish my water pick was here. But anyway, a lower pressure air system hope a lot of people do so this is cleaning out um a dead out so by the way i like touchless so when you're pulling your hive apart in spring and this is also what i suspect is wrong with that swarm trap and why the bees didn't move into it if there are any dead bees in there the tiniest cluster mold things like that scouts will reject the space so we need to clean it all up and get it out of there so lower pressure air is what i blow everything out with There are little nozzles, very focused narrow nozzles, and you can blow out all your cells with even deadbees in cells when you aim the nozzle straight at it. They just blow out.

So that's cool, blows everything out. But then you're stuck with this pollen that's often in the frames. Now, a lot of people do a lot of different things. Remember that your cells, water won't even fill the cells on drawn comb. You can't just spray it with water and fill it because the way they're shaped and the depth of them, They hold air and then water can't get in. And then once you get the water in, you can't get the water out. And so it turns into a mess, but I got one of those battery-powered water pick things.

And if you've got stored old pollen in there, it will actually shoot it out of there. And you control it, get anyone that's cheap, but has a lot of reviews. This thing has like 20,000 reviews. And people use it in their mouths, which is weird. It's clearly for beehives. And then so you can take that and it cleans out all the pollen. and it will turn that thing yellow. So don't think you're going to sneak it back inside

and put it on the sink in your bathroom or something afterwards. It's going to get messed out. But that flushes it out. Now, then you have to come back in with air. Now, this is the danger zone because now it's full of kind of messy, watery stuff, and you're going to spray that with air

and it's going to blow the rest of it out. It goes on everything. So just be ready for that. And then after that, we like to spray it with bleach water solution. And once you spray it, with bleach water solution. Can you believe it? My wife just popped in and she's going to help me out.

So this is the one that I've used. And so, I'm not going to turn it on here because this thing will squirt across the room. But this is what I clean out, difficult to clean cells. Now, you also have to weigh the value of cleaning it. You might just rotate those frames out too. But that stuff cleans it.

And this particular one is called costless or something. Who knows what? It doesn't hold a lot of water. So it's only the toughest ones. And then you have to fill it up again, of course. And the battery runs for a long time, rechargeable, everything else. So get the pollen out. And the other thing I want people to know about when we spray something with 10,

now keep in mind, too, I'm a poultry technician. So when we're cleansing, you know, stuff for chickens and bees and everything else, that 10% bleach solution. for bleach to water is pretty much the standard. And we spray it over surfaces and then we give it a dwell time, which kills all the surface bacteria. So you can do that also on those frames, but you have to rinse it off again with fresh water afterwards

when it's going to go for bees. It'll still smell like it's been at the local swimming pool, but your bees don't care about that chlorinated smell. What we don't want is a concentrated film of chlorine, but it prevents mold and stuff from happening. So I hope that's helpful. So honey drying, we got that. Do you have thoughts on the topic of condensation,

hype configuration is successful, overwinning stats? So, and this is an interesting name, being natural, being natural. So as far as the condensing hive and winter survival, because I do both. So I use a variety of configurations, insulated, non-insulated screen bottoms, not-screen bottoms, and you're going to be disappointed in what I'm about to say.

So vented, let's talk about venting the top, and the condensation has not killed my bees. There can be very wet hives, and that's one of the things to cleaning out dead bees in the bottom because some people just want to clear the entrance, so bees can do cleansing flights. Don't forget, if you do have a wet interior and there are dead bees on the bottom,

you want something that can reach to the back and scoop out as many of those bees as you can because they hold the moisture. They hold ultimately when things warm up again in spring, that will be a bacteria area. And we want to keep that out. But this is not going to be the same thing all over the country. And this is why this is really frustrating for people.

Because here in the northeastern United States, the insulated, non-vented hives do extremely well. I've also had heavily insulated hives. I don't need to name the company that makes it, but it had more water and condensation in it than any of my three-quarter inch standard hive wooden boxes. So that was a fully insulated hive, a poly hive. So it had a lot of humidity trapped inside,

and it had some venting too. So venting, not venting, the bees play the most critical role. And by insulating the top, if I vented the top, I needed more honey to get them through winter and you end up with a drier colony. But I will give you something else to chew on.

So here's the thing. It's not just whether or not we're venting through the top and getting extra air out, moisture-laden air, which helps reduce humidity inside the, the hive, it is passive ventilation. And engineers are going to look at this and people are going to do all these schematics and charts and everything. They're going to show you that the air flow through it and everything is very shifty. Like it's not straightforward. But here's what I want to tie it all

into. Maybe you're interested in Varroa destructor mites not doing well in winter. So the colonies of the bees, the health and population of the colony is the most critical part. Step one. Sizing your hive correctly for the population of the bees inside of it going into winter. Step two, because you know what I used to do? I was convinced I'm going to have a super colony in spring. I'm going to make so many splits from it, so I left three honey supers on it. I know you know what happened. So the clusters down here, they backfilled everything. There's all this food above them. They're going to just have so much going on in spring, they're going to do great, they died. So what was happening there? There's so much honey up above that was not occupied by bees. The space was exponentially

too large for the population of the bees inside the hive. So then what happened was, of course, they're warming their cluster, and then you can hear people say, they don't heat the space. They don't. They're heating one another, but there is passive secondary heat coming off of the cluster of bees, which is why we can get a heat signature off of them when you're doing 30. minimal scans. And then what's going on up above? So if there's a bunch of honey directly above them, good. Let's go up another level and have a whole bunch of honey up there too. It gets to almost the same as the outside temperature of the hive. So then what happens? Sun comes up, warms up outside. You ever notice you look outside and it's super warm and things are increasing and it's nice out,

but then you walk through your garage and it's cold and clammy in the garage, even though it's 20 degrees warmer outside, that's the condition and the concrete is damp. That's the condition that we're creating inside the hive when it's too big for the population of bees that are in there. And then now it's condensing on that honey, which acts like a cold sink. And then when it warms up outside, it condensates on that and then drips down where right under your bees and challenges them. And then there will be arguments among beekeepers, discussions, healthy discussions, and a discussions about it wasn't the moisture that killed the piece. Nobody sure did make it hard for them to survive.

And so we can make it easier by sizing your colony correctly with enough resources to get them through winter. So that was the difference. 74 pounds of honey consistently is what I used to need to leave on. That was pretty much the benchmark to get a colony bees through winter, and that's with hive top venting. Then when I stopped hive top venting, I can get them through winter with 35 or 40 pounds of fish.

honey and they don't even use it all. And then they came out with better insulation for the insulated inner covers and there's better outer cover insulation and there's new things on the market and ways to wrap up your hives. And then we reduce that even more. So sizing it right, number one. Okay, so let's take all this off the shelf now. We provided the environment they need. Now let's talk about the varroa mite. Let's create a hostile environment for the varumite. Now if you want to raise them and everybody should have pet varamites because I think it's fun to see what they can take, what they can handle, give them a little shakedown and see what the environment that they prefer is. But if you have a sealed top of your hive, no airflow through there,

what's controlling the airflow in and out of the hive, the bees themselves. People will talk about high CO2 ratings inside the hive because that's something that happens when they're respirating. Bees can take it. You or I, if we could do the honey, I shrunk the kids thing and zip up inside that hive and be in that environment, we die. because it's not enough oxygen for us is too much CO2. And so the humidity also is important to the bees. We don't always think about they have to have minimum humidity levels for the brood to not desiccate.

Here's the other part, though, that CO2 alone and closing that up and making sure that they're not ventilated up through there has reduced, and these are published studies. This isn't just something I'm pulling out of my pocket here. That the varroa destructor mite reproduction was reduced to 1% of what it was when ventilated. So that's something else that you can add to your list of reasons why, reasons not,

because I just had a beekeeping breakfast recently, and I wanted to support both arguments because it's actually a really great way to work things out is to make good arguments for venting and good arguments for not venting, and then find out if there's some quencher that makes it better not to vent. And for me, it's the reduction in Varroa, destructor might reproduction.

So think about it. They control it. They can bring in more air anytime they want to. Anytime they need it, they're going to do it. They're not going to just sit passively and suffocate. I don't know of anyone that's found a bunch of suffocated bees in a hive. As long as they have an open entrance at the bottom, the main entrance. Maybe it's 3.8.7 inch by 3 inches wide.

Just maybe. I don't know. Okay. So let's keep it going here. Do you have thoughts on the topic? That's the one we just did. Brian says they cleaned some of it, but never put honey in it.

Is there a chance of contamination? What I should do to rectify? They clean some of it but never put honey in it. Chance of contamination. All right, I must have missed something here. Let's see. Let's look back here on Brian. recently bought a flow hive.

Okay, from my niece, about 70 miles south of me, not sure if it was diseased or not. Set up a new queen with an, and medium, and they filled the super. So I out on flow hive. I don't understand the question. Okay. The only thing I'm going to be able to say here is,

I just read about Franklin in Franklin tree, supposed to be a powerhouse pollen and nectar tree. You know anything about them? I don't. That's from Keith Spillman. So pollen and the value of it. But as far as this other question, I don't, what should I do to rectify?

They clean some of it, but never put honey in it. Is there a chance? Oh, okay. So maybe we're talking about there was something wrong with a frame drawn comb or something like. that, they did some cleaning, but they never used it later. Yes, it's a candidate to remove it. If your bees are avoiding a frame or drawn comb for any reason, it's a good time to swap it out. I don't know. I'm giving presentations about how to keep swarms and stuff like that too.

And one of the biggest things that prevents swarms from moving in. And by the way, the way I do it makes some people stressed because I set the bees outside the hive and I watch them go in. I know you can pull the lid, you can dump the bees in, you can do all the stuff and be done with it in just a few minutes. That's great. Good for you. I like to set the bees in front of the hive and I want to see the process of the first workers that go in, explore the area, come back out. Once they approve, this can take a lot of time. They start fanning their Nasanoff clans. The other bees realize, hey, thumbs up, we can all go in. They start going in. And guess who comes in a little later? The queen. And she can change her mind and keep them all from. going in. But one thing that is very consistent, when they don't move into the hive, it's time to

inspect and find out what it is they're rejecting. And in some cases, it's just a little tiny cluster the size of a silver dollar of dead bees in there. Some beekeepers, if you dumped it through the top, locked them in, they would have to clean that out. They're forced to do it. You also risk an abscond later. So if we make sure that it already meets with our approval, because I like to say that bees that walk in stay in. So you find the smallest thing and it can be something that we can't see that we can't sense. Remember the bees know exactly what they're smelling. And if it doesn't feel healthy and good to them, they don't want to occupy it. And sometimes they'll even build their comb and everything else on the outside of a hide because they've run out

of options. That's the ultimate insult to the beekeeper if your bees won't move in. But if there's something your bees aren't using, they're not putting eggs in it, they're not storing resources in it. and they can't chew it out and get rid of it, it's time for you to swap it out, I think, and put a new frame, new foundation or something like that. And then if that's near a brood area, you can of course bring a frame that's already drawn

that is in use and put that there and then put a new frame on the outskirts of that. So that's just what I would think. So about the tree, by the way, for people that want to know, I have often asked, I've even talked to the owner of Ernst's Seeds about the pollen

value and the pollen sources and different grading and we know that nectar sources are inconsistent. It's not like we can say there are a lot of plants that are known to produce high yields of nectar at different times of the year and just like our weather conditions right now causing our plants or produce a higher quality nectar. So when we're looking at nectar, we care about sucrose levels and so do your bees. So they're going after the highest sugar content nectar that they can find. Now, when it comes to pollen, I like to know the pollen protein levels. And then, of course, there's usable protein. And here's again, they miss because some of them don't have a complete profile for your bees' nutrition.

Because people get stuck in that quagmire, incomplete pollen profile for bee reproduction. But at the same time, what if it's medicinal? So medicinal is not necessarily a nutritional source that's superior. So we have this situation with sunflowers and talking to Dr. Marla Spivak about that was very interesting because we've got sunflower pollen that can help your bees deal with stuff even like American foul brewed. But it wouldn't meet the standard for a complete nutritional profile for raising bee brood. So one of the other things, and it's a lot of fun, and I shouldn't tell it ahead of time because I have a conference I'm coming to.

I'm going to talk about it there. But even skunk cabbage in the wetlands in spring, a lot of people, you know, because they go after a lot of resources early spring. But I shlog around in the wetlands to look at stuff and find out what's going on. And skunk cabbage doesn't even look like cabbage yet. It's just when it's barely, it'll even melt holes in the snow. But the coolest thing for me was to learn that it's up to. a 35% protein. No wonder the bees are bringing that in and flying out in the cold to get it.

So there are, we need a list, but there again, that same plant can grow in different soil with different nutrition and produce a different protein level in its pollen. So it's kind of frustrating. And I know I didn't even answer the question. I just created more of a mess. But that tree and knowing that something is supposed to be cool. And by the way, thank you being natural for your contribution. I really appreciate it.

Okay, so what else do we have here? This is from the J. Killa 11. Hello. So David Burns said, if you see pollen coming in, he said that there may not be a queen because a queen can die. and they still bring in pollen, this is contrary to what you said. Elaborate. Is it contrary to what I said?

Anyway, see what's happening. You shouldn't ask me to go head-to-head with another YouTuber. I think that's bad form. All I can talk about is I can redirect. I can say go to Dr. Thomas Seeley's research on pollen producing. I can say go to Cornell University's B-Lab. So anyway, when they're bringing in pollen, it is true that they can be bringing in pollen

without a queen being present. Think about it. So one of the things I like to say, and I often do say, is look at the pollen rate, how much pollen is coming in within a minute. So this is kind of the cut. if there are fewer than 10 pollen loads per minute at a time when other colonies, this is key. Other colonies are bringing in plenty of pollen, but this particular one is coming in at a slow pace.

Does that mean if they have pollen coming in at less than 10 per minute that there's a queen present? No. Because what else might be present? Laying workers. If they have laying workers, they have brood. If they have brood, they have open root that needs to be fed. So these are laying worker bees that are producing drones, and those drones have to be fed. So there is pollen coming in, but it's not at a high rate.

Now, on the flip side of that, more than 10, I've never had a bee colony. So now I can say personal experience, let's settle it that way. I've never had a bee colony that had more than 10 loads of pollen coming in per minute. And that's between 11 and about 1.32 p.m. is when we tend to see the highest pollen loads coming. in and again this is plant species specific to when they're producing pollen when it's available to the bees but when they have that high load coming in i've not had them bringing in high volumes of pollen at more than 10 per minute and not had a laying queen present so that's just personal experience and if somebody else has a different personal experience then that's the way it is

but there can be pollen coming in without a queen and the queen um because the laying workers again so they do that and remember that there's still stimulated bringing these resources by the scent of open brood as well. So that's the way they know that they, it's part of the queen mandibular pheromone spread too. So their behavior is different. It's not a one-off. It's not just pollen. It's overall behavior of the hive.

And if you're in doubt ever, investigate the hive. But we don't call out other channels here. So, but those are my observations. So the next one here is, what do we have? Starting to see the AI Fred picture pop up everywhere. How do I know this is real? We need a secret phrase or something. Well, that's it.

And I know that's a joke, but my voice got used on an advertisement, and I've seen myself in advertisers, a little ads that pop up. And you can pause your video. I know this is a joke from The Amazing Hives, Dave, but you can pause a video when there's an ad showing up. And when you look at the ad and you know it's a lie. In fact, there's so many ads, they're so misleading. Like Tai Chi isn't going to give you washboard abs.

I'm just telling you. But if you pause it, there's three little dots on the right of the advertisement. You can report the ad. And I highly recommend that you do. because, and then there are categories, misleading, dangerous, false information, all those other choices. But I do recommend that you do that. I don't advertise anything on any advertisement. So it shouldn't be me popping up telling you you can get a flow high for 100 bucks or whatever it is.

But AI is very annoying. I don't even want to talk about that today. We want to talk about bees. So any great education videos for those. learning how to manage resource hives. So resource hives, videos on how to manage them, I would say, he'll get mad if you call them resource hives. But Michael Palmer has a whole series on nucleus hives for overwintering, and he calls them brood factories. And so it's kind of the same thing. I call them resource hives. But all it really is is setting aside a

colony of bees, usually swarms or when you're making splits in spring and things like that, or you're inspecting a colony of bees and you see that they're making preparations to swarm. So you open it up and like this frame over here that has huge queen cells along the edges. When you find that, you've got a queen still in the hive, it's your chance to act. You don't have to lose the swarm right then. So what you do then is collect that queen and a frame of brood and you put her in a nucleus. hive. That's for me and that's why I call them resource hives. Then they provide resources for other colonies when you've got multiple colonies of bees and you come across a colony that needs something.

And you have to, of course, make the decision, is that a colony that I want to perpetuate in my apiary? Do they have other traits that are really good? And I want to keep them going. And if they do and they just need a little bump start, then that comes from your resource hive. And so you can pull a frame of brood, something like that. Queenless colony, classic. example. We have a queenless colony and it looks like we might have some laying workers. The eggs are all odd and clustered in groups and little cells. So we know we have a problem and there's nothing but drones emerging from cells. We can come in strong and we can pull a couple of frames from resource hive with nurse bees and everything and capped brood. That's really handy. Put all that in

together and we'll suppress these laying workers and we can bring a queen with them. And then we leave the resource hive to replace their queen that we just took away. So when you find that they're already in production, there's something's going to go on, I consider those insurance policies, but all it is is a five-frame nucleus box. And as they expand and fill those five frames, I go up to three. So I get 15 deep frames, and they will winter that way. So stand alone, too, not even the Michael Palmer way, which is in northwestern Vermont. He, what I do here is, I don't, bundle them all together. They're standing free, wooden hives,

three high, and they make it through winter. And it's very interesting. So those become resources again to just continue to perpetuate your backyard apiary. And remember, we're not commercial. There are commercial people

and there are backyard beekeepers that are not under the pressures of having to make a living with our beekeeping. We're just fiddling around and figuring things out. And so resource but he would be the one to go to to see how he sets them up for wintering over and it involves bundling them together of course and uh i just do what i just described and then of course have an insulated top even if you just just the migratory covers which a lot of people do with no inner cover

if you just take a layer of double bubble and put that on the back of those frames first then that uh migratory cover which is a three quarters of an inch of pine usually and then you put a weight on top of that Those were making it through winter too. So without the feeder shim and all the other things, they seem to do really well. And keep in mind, too, what I'm trying to do is hold them back. That's counterintuitive because that's what most beekeepers want more in spring. I don't.

I don't want more swarms. I don't want colonies that build faster than they currently do. Mine are locally adapted stock that are responding to what's going on in my environment. And if I artificially simulate, grow, develop, and overpopulate them, then when the dandelions bloom in spring, I would have to, I don't know, work for a living. I would have to actually get out there and put a whole bunch of supersons, which should have already been on before the weather breaks in my neck of the woods. And right now they're doing it on cue. So I don't really want to boost them. So what I'm saying is I like it when they're held back, when the brood is a little small this time of year.

and they're full of honey. So it has to deal with kind of what you want out of your bees. So I don't need any boosting beyond that. So the AI Fred, ignore that, dude, no way. So education videos. And the next one here is Bob Amascarelli. Okay. Hi, Fred, live in Northwest Illinois two weeks ago.

I did an inspection, found an unmaided queen. after they had swarmed, waited two more weeks. Today, I did an inspection. Still no brood. Is it too late? Man, that's hard because that kind of thing. And this is it, too. You know, the bees are building up.

We had a late swarm season here. Bees are swarming when they shouldn't, but here it's not rare. September swarms are very common where I am because we also have a huge nectar flow at that time. But you've got a queen. She's just not production. is it too late?

Have there been, are there plenty of drones around? Because it's another thing too. The drone population starts to fall off at the end of the year because the workers are killing them. And so if we don't have those, that queen's chances to be made. So this is another thing I think about.

So you've got a queen and we're saying that she's a unmated queen. How long has it been like that? And this is where records are really important. What's the weather been like? Have there been mating opportunities? and is there any chance that she actually is made it. But if not, again, it's a judgment call whether or not you let those bees live out their lives because it has happened where people have seen a queen scooting around.

And obviously you can't tell if she's got eggs because you'd have to dissect her to know and we're not going to do that. So you're looking at this queen that scooting around and people have been at the last minute, you know, they're going to call in and get that carniolan queen. or whatever they need. And then what do you know? Here comes to carniola queen, and your queen started laying.

So sometimes it's just really delayed. And again, it ties in with the other things I was talking about. How much nutrition is coming into the hive and how set are they? But it has swarmed. Waited two more weeks. Two weeks is not at the end of it.

I'd go 21 days. But then again, look where we are. Now we're going into October. So, but if there's a queen, present and the bees are sticking around with her because I don't want to muddy the waters. But when you have an unmaided queen, the bees behave differently inside the hive too. So when you have an unmade queen, you lose a lot of bees this time of year in particular due to drift. And by that I mean your foragers go out and they're not foraging because there's a lot

of brutes. They don't have that pressure. So then when they forage out, they're coming back. they fly past another hive and they get in the pheromone stream there's a queenwright hive these are survivors they zip over into the other hive and join it so you'll lose numbers to drift so it's bad enough that she isn't laying because we have to plan 30 days out you know once she starts laying eggs are there enough bees in that hive with a dwindling that's going on to sustain the colony going into winter where you are So I don't know. Doesn't look good this time of year. I would expect to see brood.

So all of my colonies that are queen right have brewed right now. So things can be different where you are. But that's a call. I wouldn't buy a queen. I know there are people that will sell you queens right now. I wouldn't do that. Going to the fall with the colony that size, then you have to nurture through the entire winter

and you're going to worry about them all winter long. So you could combine them with another colony if you wanted to. But the fact that there's no brood, no cap brood at all, that means they've been without a queen. They haven't had eggs for 21 days. So they have a lot to recover from, and it may not be recoverable. So you might think about combining them with another colony if they have resources and stuff. And I want to thank BTVPTZ. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate that contribution. So now let me see. Okay, come on. What are we talking about? So I have bees ever searched you out and bunch. Okay, so am I skipping any? I was feeding two to one. Ooh, sorry for this, for those of you are watching later.

This is Marion Danubio. Anyway, I was feeding two to one, but stopped because the frames were full with no eggs and larvae. I thought they were filling the frames with. with the sugar water, now the brood is hatching. Should I start feeding again? If you have, it depends. Now see the question to whether to start feeding again and there's brood hatching is what kind of resources are present in the hive?

What's the distribution of those resources? So if there's a bunch of empty comb and a bunch of real estate that's outside the brood area where they won't be laying eggs, they won't be continuing. So immediately adjacent to this brood that's happening right now, I would not expect them to backfill all of that. If you have a bunch of frames that are out in the outskirts there, that are empty and available with drawing comb, you could still feed, assuming there isn't a heavy nectar flow.

Like me here, I wouldn't feed anything right now. They're so dense with resources and it's coming in constantly. So again, it's a local call. If they're starving, the thought process is, of course, you can feed because it wouldn't hurt. And if you don't feed and they need it, you might miss your envelope to build them up because then later as the nights get really cold we won't be putting any liquids in there so then you're going to be shifting to fondance or candy boards and things like that which is very bees don't build on those things they survive on those things so whether to feed or not to feed at this point is going to be a call based on food storage real estate that's still available inside the hive.

But they have, that's just, okay, I think, what do we have here? Rick, hello Fred, have bees ever searched you out and bumped you when they were out of syrup or water? I was getting bumped by bees in the garden. Okay, I don't think they have this ability. So in other words, it's kind of like, it's kind of like your dog picking up the dog dish. walking over to you going, yo, my dog dish is empty. You can fill that.

So then if you were feeding bees or you need a sugar syrup or something in a hive, would you go out and bump into your recognizable beekeeper to make sure that he comes over and pays attention to you? They don't function on that level that I know of. I know they can recognize you and have done lots of tests because we like to have fun with what bees recognize, what they know, and that they will seek out resources. So, for example, you could do this test. This is a plastic test tube.

We filled it with sugar syrup and not full to the top, but you know halfway. And then you let bees go in here and get some of the sugar syrup, and they sit tight and they fly away back to the hive. And so we're timing. So this is to teach kids about bees and how far away they are and timing their flights and stuff. And then more come back, and then pretty soon they're eating all the sugar syrup.

Now, let's go to a different location, but you're the same person. You're dressed the same. You haven't changed anything. Do they go to the site where the sugar syrup was? Yeah, they go there first. Then they hunt you out. They'll see you and go to you. So even if there's two other people with you, they're going to go straight to you.

Get rid of this. But you held that in your left hand. And you can do these tests at home. This is great cognition exams for bees, what they really figure out. And then when you go somewhere else, you're in a new location. So they did recognize your shape, your. colors, you know, whatever the contrast is that they're registering, they're going to go to the hand where you were holding this, even though this is gone. So it's not the smell of this anymore,

and they go to your hand. They're that specific. So these are bees that are found you before, found a resource. But as far as the advance going out and saying, hey, we're hungry over here, I'm going to bump you. We have bees flying to and from resources, and they'll just run into you. Now, the other part of that is sometimes it's defensive warning and it can be a head butt, which they're unhappy and they're a little defensive. So that will happen over and over. If you're getting head budded by a defensive bee, it's going to stick around and it's going to harass you.

And you can be in an apiary with thousands of bees flying and one of them decided that you're a problem and they need to get rid of you. But as far as soliciting for resources, no. But it is fun to test and see what they're doing. And so it says this is from, wing grooved, says, Fred, I once heard you promoting the powder, spalina. It's spirulina. And for Beagle Health, what is the dry powder on top of the frames and how much is added to a gallon of one-to-one sugar syrup? Okay, so spirulina, I've talked about it a lot, and Spirilina

is proven beneficial for your bees. If you want to see or read studies, you want to be really grounded in science, it's not a one-off. Spirulina has been beneficial to your bees. It is algae, and it is a protein source, and it boosts your bees. It boosts their gut health. Okay. So then the question is, and you can Google search, Google Scholar, go find out, read these pubs, don't take my word for it. I always want people to question everything. So we get the organic spirulina that is for, I'm looking around because I might have had a bag on the shelf here but it can mix with sugar syrup now here's the thing put the dry sugar in a container first put two tablespoons this is a lot per gallon that you're going to mix but just dry first so you put the

dry sugar in it spirally in it two scoops it's going to make the sugar syrup look almost black it's going to look dark like bee bites that come from strong microbials or something like that because that, interestingly enough, is loaded with spirulina. So you buy spirulina, you mix it up with the sugar dry, and get it all turned in until the sugar's like this army olive green. Then you mix in your water with that. Because if you try to add spilina to water or to a syrup that's already mixed, you just get clumps and it's a big mess.

So that's how you mix it together. And you never want to exceed. Think of the rules about hive-a-life, for example. If you're mixing that up, we don't want to. to exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. You don't want to damage it. So you mix that up and we've even added it to water drinkers and you can't do that. You can, but I want to explain why you shouldn't. In water drinkers, spirulina is algae. And unless you're freshening and replacing that water every single day, the water with spirulina in it can develop bacteria secondary to that. So please don't do that.

It seems like something it would be cool to do, but mixing it with sugar syrup, it does not have that risk. So, and then the bees demonstrate a preference for it. So that's the other thing. Don't do all your feeds exactly the same at one time. See what your bees are keying on. And I'm glad this question actually brought up, and here's why. The spirulina, when you mix it with sugar syrup at the end of the year, when the bees actually produce honey from the sugar syrup or they store it. right inside the hive in the cells and even cap it next spring often we open up our hives and we

realize oh man there's so much honey left over let's harvest it and then you look at it and a bunch of it's green and that's the spirulina sugar syrup honey so that is for the bees so we it kind of serves as a visual marker that this isn't honey that we can harvest and sell to people or you can need it yourself if you want to or better yet, you know, put it out at a robbing station or something like that in spring because remember in spring also when we have capped honey from the previous winter, you think and you want for the bees to use the leftover capped honey, kind of like stock rotation on a grocery shelf, push the old stuff forward, put the new stuff behind. That's not what your honeybees do. Your honeybees bring in fresh nectar and they use it first. And even

the honey that they've produced in the hive in spring gets consumed, especially uncapped honey gets consumed before it capped old honey left over from wintertime. So you can actually, once the nectar flow kicks in, they end up ignoring it and it can stay in your hives. So but keep in mind, if you've organized your boxes to where this brood box is just for the bees, the medium box on top of it is just for the bees, and there's no risk of you taking off surplus honey later, because they're not going to uncap it, take spirulina sugar syrup honey out, and move it up into your new honey super. So that hasn't happened. But if they did, you'd see it because the color's there.

But it is super good for your bees. And if somebody's scooting around saying that I'm promoting that, and then once again, this is what the spirulina looks like that I use. So that's it. Organic stuff is made for people. So safe for human consumption, and then that works. So that's Ross Wagner says, in one of my hives, the drones seem to be gathered on two frames. A lot of them, are they about to get the boot?

Now, Ross Wagner said this. Let me explain something. It's part of my talk that I give to show what happens the drone congregation area inside the hive when they're about to get the boot because drones, unlike workers, a worker at the end of her life, self-evicts. They leave the hive. If it's during the day when they're feeling like they're at the end, they also fly out.

You can walk around and look at nectar resources and flowers and things like that and see honeybeats on them, not doing anything. And then you get close and you examine their wings and their wings are all tattered. This is a worker at the end of its life. So female self-evigged. Drones, they don't. They wait to get kicked out. And so when you find your drones, kind of,

congregated together instead of fanned out the way they normally are because they're soliciting resources from nurse bees. And they're very persistent about that. They've really harassed the nurse bees to feed them and they get fed. When they're no longer doing that and they're clustered together, they're at the end. And these are older drones. Drones live a long time, by the way. And yes, they're on their way out of the hive. So the next thing here it says if you, what did I just do?

If you overwinter with two deeps, how many frames of honey should you have going in a winter? Seven. But see, again, see how he just said that? Seven frames of capped honey? It depends on how many bees are spread out. The more bees, the more resources they're going to need to get through winter. But if we're looking at it this way, see, horizontal hive, long Langstroth hive, How many frames of honey when the hive is fully populated have I seen them use year after year?

No more than seven. So seven deep frames of cap honey, both sides, drawn comb, everything is full. That has been all they've needed with some leftover in spring. So I'm comfortable saying that. And so if you've got a 10 frame box, the second box is a 10 frame, then those seven, your heaviest drawn out, comb stored with honey, your thickest one should be dead center because what happens often is your bees

are going to rise through the honeycomb and they're going to ignore the farther out frames of honey. But it's been my experience, seven deep frames of honey, both sides for one colony of bees, more than enough, insulated inner cover, insulated outer cover.

And then that's it. If it's vented, you're going to need more. So again, if anybody has a question for me, these will be in all caps, and I think I've run out of them. We can be at the end of our discussion already for this Friday, except that I have a question here that was submitted that I don't want to ignore because it was submitted through my system.

So this is from, oh yeah, now I know what it means, too. The greatest mate is his screen name. Is this hyphred interesting with bees handing out? nectar to storekeeper bees and they find the dedicated frame for that floral source question mark. So this deals with your honeybees when they're growing out and they're getting nectar and they're bringing it back into the hive. When we have pollen that's on their corbicula and they're bringing that through, the bees of course go waggle dance for a little while, brag about the pollen and where it's coming from and the other bees get to sniff it, taste it, find out what the

resources and how valuable that's going to be for their brood rearing. And then that bee goes off and scratches off the pollen into cells. And then nurse bees come along and they start working that pollen right away and they amend it with other resources. But the nectar that's coming in, where do they concentrate it? So this comes up a lot because often in spring time and we've made this clear that frame by frame in spring. So spring transitioning into summer, June, July, you end up with frames that are distinctively different from one another with the honey that they have. And this is because in spring, where I live, the bees are sourcing a variety of different things early on. They might be in the trees early. They might get nectar

from maple trees and things like that. And then they're bringing that in and they're foraging in gangs. And this is a lot of fun because they show up in big groups back at the hive. which means they're kind of going out at the same time too. And then they're just coming together in these big clusters. And when they do that in the midst of a big nectar flow like we have right now, they have what I call storekeeper bees inside. So springtime, they'll be storing it in clusters because that's where the storykeeper bees are storing it. It's not because, oh, it smells like, hmm, we should only have clover honey over here and they stock that.

and then that we should only have maple nectar over here and we stock that. They don't do that. They're just flooding it in. And when these gangs are going out, they're coming back and they've been floral constant, which means colony by colony they could be accessing different resources. And forager by forager, they can be going for different resources. But once they find a really good resource, they're bringing it back by the hundreds and thousands. And then that's why it gets concentrated by the floral source in the hive on a frame at a given time.

And then as they spread that through, it becomes a little more diverse as other things start to bloom. And then we have different floral sources coming in and then they spread it out. This time of year, at the end of the year, we start to see a lot of consistency. So if you've micro-pulled honey, which is something I recommended this year, and people have been doing it and it's really good. You're not lifting a box. You're inspecting your hive. You're looking at the honey super. Oh, there's a fully cap frame of honey.

You pull it out. You push the other together. You add another frame. and you take that one and you might be extracting four or six frames at a time instead of pulling a hole super. Very easy to do. So what happens is your bees are coming in. So at the end of the year, it's consistent. And when the nectar flows heavy, what happens when the nectar is brought in?

Like, where are these decisions being made? So you might have two to four different bees handling the nectar that's coming in that, by the way, that, by the way, is being treated with an enzyme from the bees called invertease. So they have a sucrose that they're bringing in, but this process, this enzyme is acting on it already in their honey crop before they've even gotten back to the hive. And some of the honey that they're bringing in, depending on what's going on, colony-wide, may never actually get into a cell at all. So what happens is they're waggle-dance-in. They also go through sometimes and pass it off immediately as soon as they get inside the hive.

You'll even see Trovalaxus happening on the landing board in some cases. And the minute they pass off that resource to the interior bee that's going to store it or feed it to other bees, nurse bees have to be fed. They have a lot of different uses for that nectar before it would ever even end up in surplus storage. So they're passing it off to one another. But if it's a heavy nectar flow, it's happening so much and so broad, like what happens when Goldenrod, Aster's. and all these other things start to come in where I live,

then they pack it all everywhere at once. They're overwhelmed. It is, they're all busy. They're all working. In fact, a forager can come back and find that it has to pass off to three or four different, what I call storekeeper bees, which is probably know the name for it. But their crops are still partially full of the nectar they're trying to store, and they can't even keep up with it.

And then you'll see a bee, and I don't know if you've seen it, but it is very interesting. You'll see a bee that. it's just wagging constantly. It's just waggling, just trembling and scooting all over the hive. This bee has resources that it cannot get an interior hive made to take from them. And so they're just trembling all over the hive trying to solicit one of these interior bees to take that resource so then they can get back out and forage.

And this happens a lot when there's an abundant, or flow coming in and not enough workers or space inside the hive. So let's say you're honeybound. You may have heard that discussion. If you get honeybound, they can't take any more. Now we'll have thousands of unemployed foragers sitting in the hive with full crops and nothing to do. So like I said, it could go to four different ones and they're making that decision,

but it's available space at that point. This is why now all the stores are done. everything is in, now they start back filling the brood area and the queen is running out of places to lay the egg. So that's the balance that we're kind of looking out for. And this is going to give you full circle why I don't feed them because I don't want them getting into that situation. Because what if I've been feeding them because I panicked because the hive was too light or something. Now, I've never had that problem where you go to tilt a hive and it's so light, they're in trouble and you start back feeding them, I'm saying, yes, feed that colony. But I'm not saying feed all your colonies

across the board. It's case by case. You get a heavy colony, heavy resources, abundant activity going and coming, then they're not a colony that I wouldn't want to feed anymore. So I wouldn't feed that one, just the ones that are light and feed them inside the hive. Try not to open feed. Unless you're cleaning up your gear, Indian would clean out your extractor and stuff like that, then you could robbing station set things out and they clean things up really well. Okay. Isn't it a pain to clean an extractor for only four frames? Now, what a, what are we griping about?

Only four frames, there's like seven pounds of honey per frame. And if it's deep, but here's the thing. Who said you have to clean out your extractor right afterwards? So if you're doing microharvest, which we do, so my extraction, set up is set up and then we take these big industrial clear trash bags and it goes over the extractor so in other words we processed it the honey's out and there is a little residual honey in there and that's perfectly okay because in a few days it's going to receive more frames so this is a judgment call some people just have that little hand crank two frame extractor I used to have one and I would invite people over to

help me with honey processing, then talk him in to being the one that stands there and cranks that thing forever. But if I do micro harvesting, it is the bees didn't care. So that's the other thing. We didn't create a hostile bee yard. If you go out and you're pulling holes, soupers and all that, again, keep in mind, I'm not under the pressure to be a commercial beekeeper. I'm just getting frames to satisfy the person that brought me this spirulina bag and my supervisor who's 11 who has to sell honey door to door. And so if I pull six frames today or eight frames today, take them right in, uncap, extract, put those out, clean up the frames.

Now, when I have drawn comb from those frames, and let's say they're still wet, you just extracting them. Now you go to another hive, and you pull a couple of frames out, and you put two of those frames in right away. Do you know what the Bs do? They go right after the frames that you brought with you. When you pull the deep frame that was capped, it's a feel good thing because they're all over that, and they're not defensive, and they don't feel like they got robbed because they can't weigh it. They don't know that you just took all their stuff and are using them by giving them drawn combs.

They can just refill that again. And it is very, how many times have you pulled a super and you don't use queen excluders because you follow the honey bridge thing or something like that. And in the middle of that super that you just pulled, there's like a third of a frame of brood. Well, that's just mess it up. If you're micro harvesting, then you're not pulling out any of the brood and you're keeping the resources next to where that brood is, which now allows you, let's think long langstroth, when you get to the edge of the brood and there's capped honey there, you can pull that frame,

scoot the other frames up, and you get a harvest out of it with having to worry. What do you think? Everyone comes up with their own ways, and whether or not you clean your extractor, I don't have any requirement to clean that extractor until I'm done with it for the year. What's going to spoil? It's antibacterial. The honey's in there. The thing is to keep it closed up and safe, you don't want flies in it and stuff like that, definitely. But for me, it doesn't have to be washed out completely every time. So is there an extractor that works for just a few frames of time? There are lots of them.

The handcraft, there are extractors that only hold three frames, for example. But there are extractors all sizes. So I can't direct you there because the market is huge. There are so many. and so about micro harvesting if you leave honey in the extractor it draws in moisture what's the risk of fermentation well that's fair it could draw in moisture and you could get high moisture honey in there i'm not saying leave it for a week without cycling honey through it when you're micro extracting you're doing it every few days so yeah if you left it for a

a long time it could even set so it could crystallize if you let's let's do this safety feature if you smell anything that smells off about the honey that's in there you take that whole extractor outside because it's on wheels because you watch me so you do what i do so it's on big wheels you roll it outside in the grass and you let the wasks come and get it let them have that and then they clean it up or you just hose it all out dry it out and start again so if it's off you definitely want if anything's smells off or whatever. But like I said, I'm not telling you to leave that extractor for weeks. It's because we are doing it. We were pulling honey every three or four days. So, and then ending up with, you know, just one big bucket of honey and then going apart like the one that was shown in

my How to Dry Your Honey Out video. And so I don't want to have to bring four of those in, right? So again, it's a, I'm retired. I just do bees now. So I'm out. So I'm out. there all the time. And if I find a colony that's getting ahead of itself at risk of being honeybound or something like that, I'm going to pull some frames. In fact, this year is the first time I have to pull frames from an observation hive because they're so jammed. They've run out of room. They are, in fact, honeybound right now. So, yeah, you want to be aware. I mean, you got to know the moisture levels. When you're draining honey out of an extractor, you can sit right there with your rectometer and test it and see if we're having a problem. But the smell is going to hit you first.

So if there's anything off at all, you're going to wash it. But that has not happened to me here. Okay. We'll put your extractor in Fred's tent, in your own tent. Okay. Do to do to do. So people had questions about extractors. We just talked about it. We're good to go. Here's the other thing because several of you, by the way, wanted to make sure that I shared this. So I did a drawing. This is from Cheesehead Homestead 1. So I want to give credit where credits do you. But I did this really fancy drawing. Okay.

So if you look what I'm doing here, if you have honey that needs to be dried out. And because people talk about, do we have to stir it? Do we have to like do something to mix it up? Because this is why I say and try to tell you as often as I can, do not leave the honey in these big pails.

process it right away. Don't let it stratify and stuff. If you see a really fine white foam on the surface of your honey, sometimes condensation is forming. You know what that is? It is protecting itself. And so it's antibacterial. It's hydrogen peroxide.

It makes its own defense mechanism. If you see that, it's defending itself. But anyway, seven gallon bucket, which is what I use. Another seven gallon bucket below it. several people do this and want you to know so I'm sharing you open the this is assuming the water content is high and you're trying to dry it down what's high anything over 20 anything under anything under 20 to 19 is no good for me anything from 19 to 18 is no good for me i need 18 personally or lower because from 19 to 20 you still run a risk of fermentation over 20 percent

water, it's going to ferment. Guaranteed, you might as well make mead. Well, we're on that topic. I did a sweet video on how to make me, you can watch it. So with these pails, because let's say, oh, bad weather's coming, you had to collapse a hive, you had to condense it down and get ready for winter. So you've got some unripe honey in there, and you're going to dry that down. It wasn't cap. And the interesting part was the uncapped honey that we found was at 17% moisture. That was cool. That meant we didn't have to uncap it. We spun it out. and have fantastic honey from it. Moving on.

So you can put the bucket up there. It's important. Seven gallon bucket, seven gallon bucket. Then you just open. This is inside your controlled environment. So for me, it's that Vivo sun that's sitting 20 feet for me right here. And it has the dehumidifier, the blowers, and all that stuff. So it has a rack.

So then it would slow drain. So you just open the honey gate just enough to have less than the diameter of a pencil going down. into that lower bucket. And just let it be like that while your fan, your heater, and everything else is running in there to dry the honey. Once it hits that bottom bucket, because guess what it's doing? It's also mixing it while it's filling.

Then when it did that, test it. See what the water percentage is. If it's not dry enough yet, bucket from up above goes down below. This bucket goes up, cycle it through in the same way until you hit that moisture percentage. So it works. that's it so i want to that's it for today what is it say

i'm put your extractor yeah all right so the next thing i'm going to say is people have asked where i'm going to be presenting so we're in the fluff section now so i understand if you're busy you got somewhere to go something to do but on the third and fourth of october i'm going to be in winatchie washington washington state so i'm going to be there with cameron reynolds and dr david peck some other people, and so we're going to be there for that. That's the third and the fourth of October. So if you're in Washington State, that's where I'm going to be. The next one is the 10th of October in Williamstown, West Virginia, is Beersville Bees Fund Day.

So I'm going to be there, and I'm doing practical demonstration for kids and beehives and stuff, and plus I'm going to give a presentation. So that's Beersville Beersville Bees Fund Day, 10 October. Williamstown, West Virginia. After that, the 16th and 17th of October, Virginia Beekeepers Conference in Culpepper, Virginia. So I'll be at the Virginia State Conference, Culpeper, Virginia, 16 and 17 October. The next one, 23 and 24 October, I'll be at the Ohio State Beekeepers Convention, Ashdabula, Ohio, at Kent State University. So for those of you here in that area,

if you're interested, Ohio State, beekeepers Association, Ashribule, Ohio, Ken State University, 23, 24, October. And then we're going to jump ahead to the first week of November, the Pennsylvania State. Beekeepers Association,

State College, Pennsylvania will be on the 6th, the 7th, and the 8th of November. And so those are the places that I have upcoming that I'm presenting at and thank you for those of you who are interested and ask or want to know because you find out I'm 10 miles up the road and you wanted to come and give me a free cup of water or something like that, I'd be happy to see you. So I want to thank you for being with me today.

And I hope you learned something in today's chat. If you find out you're seeing it later after the fact, you still have questions. Please go to the way to be.org, click on the page mark contact, fill out the form, submit your topic. Or you can make a comment later. write down under this video. I read every comment. I want to thank you all for being here and thank you for the questions in the chat today. And I wish you all the best with your bees and beekeeping. I'm Frederick Dunn and this has been The Way to Be.